SNAFU has always seemed like a fine comment on the world in general at just about all times and places.

JOOTT

Pronounced 'Jute'; it stands for 'Just One Of Those Things'. Sooner or later every organisation/user will run into problems which are not amenable to logical or technical solutions, or even plain common sense. JOOTT is used to describe those inexplicable computer problems which fix themselves, or are fixed by turning off the machine and restarting, or in more persistent cases, reinstalling the software.

[If] Nobody knows what caused the problem, or why it went away, it was JOOTT!

Quote from: Carol Haynes on July 19, 2008, 10:22 PM

SNAFU has been dated back as far as 1941 and FUBAR back to 1944 (both US Army slang now in general use)

I remember playing a video game 20 years ago on the Intellivision called SNAFU. I had no idea what it meant, but even today I have fond memories of steering my snake/worm thing around trying not to get trapped in a corner or have my tail eaten off. I can even remember the music. Just goes to show how commonplace that (rather obscene (for kids)) term has become since it was originally coined.

I wonder if the first recursive acronym is GNU (GNU's Not Unix) which Stallman came up with in the mid-eighties.  Anybody aware of an earlier one?

In computing, an early tradition in the hacker community (especially at MIT) was to choose acronyms and abbreviations that referred humorously to themselves or to other abbreviations. Perhaps the earliest example in this context, from about 1977 or 1978, is TINT ("TINT Is Not TECO"), an editor for MagicSix. This inspired the two MIT Lisp Machine editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). These were followed by Richard Stallman's GNU (GNU's not UNIX). Many others also include negatives, such as denials that the thing defined is or resembles something (that the thing defined is, in fact, usually similar to).

In Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, published 1979, Douglas Hofstadter uses the acronym GOD, 'GOD Over Djinn'. As a genie explains to Achilles, GOD stands for GOD Over Djinn, remarking that "GOD can never be fully expanded." In the German translation it is rendered as "ZEUS ewig über Dschinn", meaning "Zeus eternally over Djinn".

Quote from: J-Mac on July 22, 2008, 06:11 PM

That sounds promising.  I wonder what could cause such a forbidding bug and take all that time to fix?

have you seen the thread about the guy working in MS ?
Article: take a peek into MS Windows development